We received word that a federal judge issued a stay against Trump’s unconstitutional ban on people arriving from predominantly Muslim countries. When the protest started, there were fifty people detained here. Now there are nine. I spoke with a lawyer who said that he tried to get in to see them earlier. Either they will be released tomorrow, or there will be an emergency hearing to release them tomorrow. More to come.

An ex-KGB chief suspected of helping the former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to compile his dossier on Donald Trump may have been murdered by the Kremlin and his death covered up. it has been claimed.

Oleg Erovinkin, a former general in the KGB and its successor the FSB, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Boxing Day in mysterious circumstances.

Erovinkin was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and now head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, who is repeatedly named in the dossier.

Erovinkin has been described as a key liaison between Sechin and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Mr Steele writes in an intelligence report dated July 19, 2016, he has a source close to Sechin, who had disclosed alleged links between Mr Trump’s supporters and Moscow.

The death of Erovinkin has prompted speculation it is linked to Mr Steele’s explosive dossier, which was made public earlier this month. Mr Trump has dismissed the dossier as “fake news” and no evidence has emerged to support its lurid claims.

Rosneft offered Trump aide Carter Page a huge cut of the company in exchange for lifting sanctions, which is coming this weekend

You know, in the run-up to the election, my relatives who voted for Trump were like, “Oh don’t worry. He’s just appealing to the evangelical rednecks. He’s not actually going to do any of those things,” when Trump talked about building a wall and banning Muslims on the basis of religion. And my mom was like, “So you think he is telling a bald-faced lie, and you’re voting for him anyway? How does that make sense? Its bad if he’s lying, and even worse if he’s telling the truth about something he actually means to do.”

I’m not one of those liberal/leftists who makes fun of “rednecks.” On my father’s side, I have relatives in Arkansas. Some of them are well-to-do, but we know we’re only one or two generations removed from Ozark mountain folk who came over with the Irish Diaspora, and who were still speaking Gaelic until my paternal grandmother’s generation.

But the (admittedly few) republicans I have talked to voiced the same opinion; that it’s mostly the working class who fears Islamic extremism, and Immigrants coming in and competing with them for jobs. My maternal uncle is retired. His kids, my Generation X-aged cousins, including the one black sheep who voted for Hillary Clinton (he used to refer to himself and my mom and us as “The Black Sheep Squadron”) have for the most part succeeded in their chosen fields.

But that’s a subject for another post. The point I am trying to make here is, if the ones I spoke to are reflective of Trump’s middle-class base, many of his actual supporters voted for him thinking that he was straight-up lying to get votes, to appeal to a certain demographic that was not them, playing to their xenophobia with a smile and a wink of his eye.

Well, he’s not. And in this case, it’s proving to be the worst case scenario.

Of course we’re going to fight this. America was founded on the ideals of religious liberty, of separation of church and state, and of being a place where people who are imperiled in their land of origin can come and make a fresh start. To me, those are three things which made America stand out from other nations. It’s so surreal that Germany under Angela Merkel is now the leader of the free world, while the incoming GOP leader is openly pandering the Nazis and to Russia’s strongman dictator.

It’s not common knowledge that the core tenets of the Nazi mindset actually began in America and were imported to Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. But my grandfather, and the fathers and grandfathers of many Trump’s supporters went to war to fight people who sound like Trump, who keep company with people like Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer. They should have known better. And if you walk into the voting booth on Super Tuesday thinking that the candidate of your choice is lying just to get votes from a certain demographic, you seriously need to rethink your life.

Full disclosure: I was a “9/11 truther” until the report came out sometime in 2004. The part of me that still has truther sympathies is kind of worried right now, because last time a Republican president was ridiculed this hard, a major terrorist attack happened on US soil, and suddenly everyone was buying yellow ribbon magnets and wearing crying eagle sweatshirts, and talking about how we had to “respect the office.”

After the report came out it still wasn’t a good look for the Bush administration, due to epic bungling.

For years I was of the opinion that the Bush administration knew something was going to happen, but did nothing because it was convenient for them – one of my first LJ entries was on that subject. Then my opinion changed, and I decided that they had just been incompetent and complacent – but that they used the event after the fact as an excuse to drum up support for Bush, and for war in Iraq, even though none of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqi, and there was no Al Qaeda presence in Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

According to some stuff I remember from the time, Bush had wanted to go back to war with Iraq prior to 9/11, but there was just no support for any kind of action, and no intel that anything was happening there for us to be worried about. Saddam Hussein was soundly beaten in Desert Storm 1991 – but it wasn’t the “redemption” for losing in Vietnam that some people wanted it to be, because he’d escaped.

And if they knew something was about to happen and did nothing to stop it, it may not technically qualify as a false flag – but it still served its purpose of getting people to line up behind GW Bush and support a military action against Saddam Hussein that no one was in support of before. But then 9/11 happened, and the Bush admin railroaded us to war.

And the “we have always been at war with Eastasia” doublethink that conservatives adopted after 9/11 and leading up to the Iraq war laid the groundwork for what is going on right now with Trump. They want to be right, and they want reality to reflect what they think it should be rather than what the evidence says is actually going on. They want to feel good about themselves again after Vietnam and Nixon and Iran Contra and eight years of GW Bush. And everything they do to that end makes them look worse and worse, and deep down they have to be aware of this. But as usual in cases like this, they double down on the fantasy.

They’re so deep in their fantasy right now that they’re okay with Nazis. This is how far it’s gone. When confronted about the worrying fact that so many white nationalists have essentially taken over the Republican party, the standard response is “You libs will call ANYONE a nazi” even though they straight up called Obama Hitler for eight years.

I think that the dissemination of the Richard Spencer punching video may be a wakeup call for some, but others I have talked to are like the “Nice Neighbors” from that one macro, who never rocked the boat and never spoke out of turn, or made trouble for anyone – and who refused to worry about their neighbors being dragged away by the SS or the Stasi.

The problem boils down to the fact that they just don’t want to have to think about it.

I mean they can’t even admit that Trump’s just a trashy reality TV star who closelined Vincent McMahon and cheated on his wives and “grabbed women by the pussy,” defrauded college students, and sold shitty vodka and subpar steaks. They have to act like he’s some kind of anointed god to even be able to cope – something that they accused Democrats of doing with Obama even though there hasn’t been any documented evidence to back this up, as there has been with Republicans doing so with Trump and George W. Bush.

It would be better if they just straight up admitted “we know he is a trashy reality TV star, we just voted for him as a protest vote, and to piss everyone else off.” But that doesn’t make them feel good about themselves. And Republicans are reactionaries who respond to primarily to feeling.

This wasn’t something I realized until someone in a FARK.com thread explained it to me, using Newt Gingrich as an example. Republicans experience no cognitive dissonance when New Gingrich, a serial adulterer, talks to them about Republicans being the party of “family values” – not because of the evidence of what he has done, but because of how his words make them feel.

You can present evidence to Republicans until you’re blue in the face, and it won’t matter – only feelings matter to them. They primarily respond to emotion. And they want to feel good about themselves.

This is why they hate “Social Justice Warriors.” They don’t want to think too hard about how the things they say or do may effect other people, and they don’t want to be made to feel guilty for it. Their reaction is not introspection; their reaction is to angrily lash out at “Social Justice Warriors” because they made them feel bad. Yet the fact that feel bad means that on some level, they know what they are doing is wrong.

Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.

They voted for a hostile, blustering, psychopathic narcissist who has promised to do things which will hurt his own base the worst, if he is allowed to do it; because we made them feel bad.

Think about that. Think about it especially the next time one of them calls you a “snowflake.”

There is also an opportunity here for social engineering on a mass scale, if we’ll take it – especially if we manage to use the Church Of Kek’s own playbook against them. It’s just that so many leftists feel like ain’t nobody got time for that anymore. But if there is another terrorist attack, or anything of you nature, you can bet the Trumpettes will take advantage of it and rally the fence-sitters into full compliance – exactly the way they did after 9/11, and leading up to the War in Iraq.

…and I just finally realized why one of their favorite taunts is “you don’t think for yourselves, you just wait for someone to tell you what to think.” (not that they don’t do that up to 11, but.) The reason that they do this is because they think making up their own version what they prefer to believe in, and rejecting actual events which conflict with their invented mental constructs is totally right and normal. They’re mocking us for relying on verifiable facts and evidence because, in their minds, it means we refuse to make up our own version of reality in our heads and reject parts of actual reality that conflict with this. I used to have this problem myself, but close calls with an actual cult or two has somewhat cured me of this. I’ve learned to realize when I’m doing it, and when I see other people doing it. But they’re holding up confirmation bias and rationalization as positive traits. When confronted with evidence, they double down on the fantasy. Of course this means that conservatism in America today has morphed into an actual cult. See also: When Prophesy Fails.

In 1981, Richard O’Brien attempted to film a sequel to the famous “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” The original storyline (Brad And Janet go to Frank N Furter’s home planet) could not be filmed due to the writer’s strike which was in full swing by then. He settled on a story which could be filmed on a soundstage: one in which Brad and Janet, Betty Hapschatt, and the Criminologist are forced to come to grips with a Denton, USA that is gradually being taken over by a narcissistic, media-obsessed Fast-Food mogul turned Reality TV show mastermind. Sound familiar?

In the spirit of that theme, I post this now. Whatever you do, do it anyhow. Even if you have to fight for it. Especially if you have to fight for it. And remember: the sun never sets on those who ride into it. We just gotta keep going.